Luciano Galasso on Social Networking
I found this article today on the ABC News website and it made me think of a few other things I would like to talk about. The idea of social networking and the impact that it has had on our culture and how it is that we view the world. Now, keep in mind, that this blog is all my opinion and I have no professional background on this subject to back me up but I also would like to hear what everyone else has to say.
I’m going to start with the idea of facebook and myspace and then get down to what the article is talking about, the one and only twitter. Remember those days when you used to ask someone for their number? and that was a big deal? Well it’s an even bigger and scarier deal now-a-days. What stemmed from the phone number asking once the internet came around was the idea of an email. Emailing someone back and forth was a way to work up to the phone number. To get to know someone before you actually heard each other’s voices. It was also a great for when you decided that things weren’t going to work out because then you could just stop responding to their emails, instead of having them call you all the time. But then social networking websites came around. Arguably they have been around before with dating sites and others but they only exploded once MySpace came around. MySpace was the first social network to really make headlines. There may have been some others but MySpace was certainly the first one that I had heard about and it was the first one that I decided to check out. I got my account, I uploaded some pictures, but then I realized that none of my friends had MySpace and so I just sort of put it aside.
I then had heard about facebook through a friend that was a few years older than myself. They were away at University at the time and I was in my senior year in high school. My friend talked about facebook as if it were the coolest thing ever. She talked about how she had “added” all of our other friends on facebook and how she could leave them “wall posts” to see how they were doing. I too was intrigued. I wanted to get this thing that they called “facebook” but I was told I would have to wait until I was enrolled in a post-secondary institution. Defeated I went back to msn.
MSN, another form of social networking, a more instant form of emailing. My parents always asked me “why don’t you just call your friends instead of sitting on the computer all day”. I was always afraid to tell them that half of the people I had on msn I didn’t have phone numbers for nor did I really know what to say to them in person. That being said, MSN allowed me to expand my network of friends because I had much more confidence. I wasn’t afraid to tell a girl I had feelings for her or tell my friend I was mad at him. I was a whole new person.
But, just a few months after I first heard about facebook, a friend who was my age and in my class, told me to go and look at her “albums on facebook”. “I thought you couldn’t get facebook if you were in high school” I protested. Turns out they had expanded the site to include high schools. My tiny little high school had made it on the map. So I got facebook and began adding friends. Soon, instead of asking people for their emails in order to add them on msn to get to know them, I simply had to ask “what’s your name” and I could find out anything I wanted about them and more. I found myself adding people that I barely knew, just to find out more about them. This is what I believe some people call “facebook creeping”. I like to rename facebook, stalkbook.
With the introduction of things like MySpace and Facebook, my friend network continued to grow, from old friends who I hadn’t seen since grade school to that new girl I met at the library the other day who happened to notice I had a third year economics textbook. These connections weren’t as strong as my msn connections because unlike msn where I talked to the people I had on my list every once and awhile, on facebook I really didn’t have to talk to them to know what was going on in their lives. I could simply read status updates, look at their photos or read their interests (along with the school they went to, where they work etc). I was also able to see who they were “friends” with and see if I had any mutual friends. In reality, most of these people weren’t really my friends at all. Then I realized I had to set my privacy settings really high or someone like an employer may see my profile and find me unfit to hire.
Years later, facebook got all fancy and started adding annoying applications and altering its format and doing some other things and so some people decided, facebook now has too much going on. we need something simple. Thus, the popularity of twitter was born. For those of you who have yet to jump on the twitter band wagon twitter is essentially a space where one creates an account and in 140 characters, tells everyone what they are doing, thinking about, where they are etc. You are able to “follow” others status updates as well as people are able to follow yours – if you chose to accept. As the article I have provided points out, this simple concept has gotten some people into trouble. That being said, twitter has also allowed people to keep up to date with situations going on in real time without waiting for the news to report their side of the story. Many celebrities, who are followed by thousands, have created even larger fan bases because of twitter but this has also gotten them into trouble, considering thousands of people are reading their every “tweet”. “Tweeting” has become a new form of citizen journalism. Blogging takes people too long. By the the time they have written about a subject, another update may have come and gone.
Where is twitter, and social networking going? Nobody knows. We are always trying to complicate things and make things more complex but as the creators of twitter show, simple if often the most effective.
A friend actually sent me a funny video she found about people’s new addiction to twitter on youtube. feel free to check it out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w
If you’d like, you are welcome to follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/luciano_galasso
